British Irishman, not a Black and Tan

In tribute to Anselm Kiefer, the German artist who faced up to his country’s ugly past using art.

In the Ireland of 2016 the British community (Protestant and unionists) still carry the curse of plantation, Cromwell, the famine, the Black and Tans and one-party rule Stormont. (Read ‘Being a planter‘ here.)

The Protestant and unionists are the villains, by birth levied and vilified with historical wrong. Catholic is Erin and virtue, Protestant is Saxon and guilt.

When Americans think of Britain they think of Monty Python or Downton Abbey.

When the French think of Britain they think of bad food and warm beer.

When the Irish think of Britain they think of a rapacious, brutal Empire and its pitch-capping mercenaries.

As any civic republican should know, allegiance to a country does not mean advocacy or approval of government policy, especially not centuries past policy. The citizen is not Whitehall.

It was Britain who gave to the world a model of democracy that embeds an Opposition and the option to punish a government and install a new one that may remedy and atone for the old one.

Yet the republican left conflate the ordinary British citizen with the small British elite. As any leftist knows, it is the height of moral repugnance to allow the the act of a mad few to colour the upright many. A phobia of a large demographic is forbidden today, except it seems for the British community in Ireland. Do we live with britophobia?

My Britishness can be summed up in four Bs – Bevan, Beveridge, [Eric] Blair, BBC.

I am not Trevelyn, have no connection or fondness for him, and I do not advocate his free market principles on the importation and distribution of corn reserves.

But if a traditional republican is to hear me self-identify as British I am suddenly an “imperialistic blood-sucker” and defender of the centuries long destruction and plunder of Ireland, it’s people, language and culture.

“The Irish were taught that feeling [disaffection] by Englishmen. England has only even professed to treat the Irish people as part of the same nation with ourselves, since 1800. How did we treat them before that time? I will not go into the subject of the penal laws, because it may be said that those laws affected the Irish not as Irish but as Catholics. I will only mention the manner in which they were treated merely as Irish. I grant that, for these things, no man now living has any share of the blame; we are all ashamed of them; but “the evil that men do lives after them”.”

“Drawing up historical balance sheets is never easy. When it comes to British Ireland, it is especially hard. Even today, four centuries after the first plantations, the ‘Brits’ are a long way from being forgiven for their sins.”

The curse Cromwell et al. is strong. Almost everyday the words of James Craig are thrown at me, “Protestant parliament for a Protestant people” (in various forms); and it seems like every single major speech by Sinn Fein cites this infamous maxim.

But of course we must remember, republicans especially, what George Boyce wrote:

“[James Craig’s] statement in 1934 that he stood for ‘a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state’ must be seen in the context of de Valera’s claim that ‘we are a Catholic nation’.”

The enduring statement and restatement of Britain’s historical wrongs covers the whole spectrum, from Twitter trolls to Áras an Uachtaráin.

A few months ago Michael D. Higgins said that the Easter Rising has not been subjected to the same fault-finding edge as British imperialism.

But Irishness for the last century has been been shaped almost entirely as opposition to British imperialism and “800 years of British oppression” – a refrain I was born on the wrong side of and have heard my whole life.

“A London that regarded [Michael Collins] his people as inferior, his Irish culture as worthless, and his language as an object for replacement by erosion or coercion. It was not as an equal citizen he stood in London.”

He mentions the famine, pikes and the 1798 rebellion. He quotes Britain as a “mighty rapacious and material Empire” and recalls the many foreign revolts. The Briton is always the jailer, the eviction officer, and the Black and Tan (never the social reformer or inventor).

Two defining pillars of Michael D. Higgins stewardship of Áras an Uachtaráin have been to speak against historical ‘amnesia‘ and to promote ‘Ethical Irishness‘.

Yet the Irishness of today, as restated by Higgins, is formulated in total opposition to and absolute abhorrence of Britain.

Michael D. Higgins said in his speech that “no single side had the monopoly of either atrocity or virtue”. But as things stand currently, Britishness is synonymous with unpardonable atrocity, and [republican] Irishness with impeccable virtue.

When I say to people south of the border that I’m British (as well as Irish) they look at me as thought I’m having a GUBU moment.

There is little to no concept in the south and among northern nationalists that a person can be Irish and British and the two identities can cohabit. I have written before that the south suffers a terrible ignorance of the northern Protestant unionist.

The core of this problem, I believe, is the coupling of the present ordinary British citizen with past British misconduct.

It is also to do with a deep ancestral beating-heart tribalism and antipathy to Britishness.

People can garland Ireland’s independence from Britain with the lofty ideals of equality, but they can also explain it in terms of simple tribal atavism; as Michael Collins wrote:

“The British form of government was monarchical. In order to express clearly our desire to depart from all British forms, we declared a Republic. We repudiated the British form of government, not because it was monarchical, but because it was British. We would have repudiated the claim of a British Republic to rule over us as definitely as we repudiated the claim of the British monarchy.”

Forgetting his objection to historical amnesia, in a recent speech to the Scottish Parliament Higgins perfectly insulated himself against the fact that Scotland is British and a Scottish majority are happily so.

Modern Britishness does not make me or anyone a champion of Empire, and George Orwell (Eric Blair) taught us that. Orwell was scathing in his criticism of Empire and the British ruling elite, but that didn’t diminish his Englishness or Britishness.

Modern Britishness is about the solidarity of the welfare state and the NHS, and the sense of togetherness that the BBC brings.

This post is not a defence of the British record in Ireland, but an effort to articulate a Britishness that has no connection to Britain’s past but rather, to Britain’s present and future. A note for republicans to maybe decouple British past with British citizenship.

I am deeply critical of Britain’s past, but that doesn’t make me any less committed British. This is proper and healthy, criticism is not repudiation.

“Things are being done in Ireland that would disgrace the blackest annals of the lowest despotism in Europe.”

Britishness may not be fashionable (thanks to the left), but that doesn’t make it illegitimate.

Fintan O’Toole wrote that the visit of Queen Elizabeth in 2011 signalled the death of anglophobia. He was wrong. Irishness and the Irish still define themselves by what the evil Empire, Britain and the Black and Tans did to them. In 2015 Gerry Adams still talks about the plantation and “our colonial history”.

An Irishness than perennially demonises Britain and vilifies anyone who self-identifies as British is not ethical. The “ethical Irishness” of Michael D. Higgins has much work ahead.

“hundreds of thousands of Irish people wanting to remain part of the UK has more diplomatic punch than hundreds of thousands of ‘British people in Ireland’ wanting to remain part of the UK”….

A most important and telling point. This constant reiteration currently of the mantra ‘British people in Ireland’ simply underlines and so serves to spuriously “validate” the “Colony” argument of their opposite numbers across the political divide.

As you say “an evangelical, fire-breathing, Antrim-Orangeman is a product of Ireland……. to say that said person is not Irish is simply ludicrous”.

I’d mentioned Jack White’s 1920 article from “Red Hand”, “Shane’s Cairn or Shane’s Castle” some time back where he describes how the fertile interplay of “Planter and Gael” (evident before the great confected polarisation of 28th September 1912) can each provide important moral qualities the other lacks! Sadly only a few of us seem to even begin to recognise this seemingly very obvious possibility.